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Glamorous and Toothsome: Kerri Kenney, Nina Hellman and Jody Seifert of Cake Like. |
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The members of Cake Like lead glamorous New York lives when they're not playing music. Kerri Kenney used to be on MTV's The State. Nina Hellman acts in off-Broadway plays. Until recently, Jody Seifert worked for Donna Karan.
Last time Cake Like played in Portland, somebody stole the equipment right out of the group's van. Kenney's message to the bandit(s): "We're coming back to Portland and we're going to fuck with y'all." |
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Easy Come, Easy Go BY ALYSSA ISENSTEIN The members of Cake Like stumbled into being a band in the same way some people stumble into a life of crime--it sounded like a good idea at the time. Fortunately for them, this spur-of-the-moment technique worked. Kerri Kenney, Nina Hellman and Jody Seifert didn't know how to play their instruments back in 1993, but they embraced the DIY ethic: no experience required. So they started Cake Like, a band with no captain. The trio's songs are written democratically, and during a recent interview with WW, all three members passed the phone around. Bass player and singer Kenney explains the haphazard way the three got together: "Friends we knew were in bands and they had instruments we could borrow or have. It just seemed like a fun thing to do because so many of our friends were doing it." Hellman continues the story. "At first, Kerri wasn't playing bass, she was just singing.... Bass came into the picture a couple of weeks later. I wanted to play guitar because I had gone to a practice space with some friends who were also starting a band, and we just switched around instruments and I picked up a guitar--I had never played guitar in my life--and I was just making noise. It started from there." When a band forms first and learns to play later, often its sound can be a messy jumble of notes, chords and screechy voices. That's not the case with Cake Like. Fueled by powerful and interesting vocals, the band adheres to the rule that less is more. Bruiser Queen, Cake Like's second and most recent album, is full of unconventional pop songs that veer into light funk or jazzy rhythms. Like the efforts of fellow New York act Sonic Youth, Cake Like songs take a while to brew, but the many layers eventually shine through. Not content with one melody and one vocal line, Cake Like often employs a bass melody and a guitar melody that battle it out and finally come to terms with their lack of a game plan. "Kerri can be playing a melody on bass and I can be playing a [different] melody on guitar," Hellman says. "We're not like a normal three piece, where the bass keeps the rhythm. We flip-flop all over the place." The band's vocal lines also duke it out, as Kenney and Hellman often sing at the same time--not responding to each other, but highlighting one another. On the song "Pretty New," for example, the two sing a round, except they each use different lyrics, and the result is ingenious. Perhaps due to their lack of musical schooling, the band members avoid extraneous fluff, and their songs are as direct as a straight line. From its casual beginnings, Cake Like moved on to playing live, and at one of its first shows, avant-garde musician John Zorn was in the audience. "He came up to us after the show and said, 'Hey, do you have enough songs for an album? Because I'll put it out anytime you want,'" Kenney says. After the shock wore off, the band called Zorn, and soon its first album, Delicious, was released on his label, Avant. Delicious was well-received critically, but sales were slow, in part because Avant is a Japanese label, so the CD had to be priced as an import in the United States. That didn't keep the band from garnering a following that includes Cars frontman Ric Ocasek, who helped the band strike its latest record deal. "Ric produced a single of ours," drummer Seifert says, "and he's managed by Elliott Rogers, and Vapor Records is Elliott and Neil Young's label. Ric told Elliott to check us out, and that's how [Bruiser Queen] started." The band found a spot on this year's H.O.R.D.E. tour, which Young headlined. At the time of this interview, Cake Like had spent the past two weeks on the road with Young. "We see him everyday, but it's not like we go into his bus and shoot the shit with him or anything," Seifert says. "We say hello, and then we run." As Cake Like has never had a game plan, what the future holds for the band is as unstructured as its songs. "We take it one day at a time," Kenney says. "Right now, we don't have a new record written and the record company knows that--they're going at our speed. We'll go back to New York and our lives for a while, and then try and start writing new songs." |
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